Why I’m selling my vote to my son

‘How are you going to pay me back?’ This is the eternal question of the hard-pressed dad as he hands £10 to a teenage son with an urgent appointment at the snooker club. ‘My Saturday job,’ says Isaac satirically. He hasn’t got a Saturday job and that’s my fault, apparently. His friends all have immensely well-connected parents who can offer them high-powered internships at Miramax and Coutts. But Isaac hasn’t secured one of these coveted placements. His mother, an archivist, employs an assistant who doesn’t need a second assistant. And the only professionals I know are narcissistic scribblers who sit at their laptops in a fug of crack fumes and unwashed laundry. The last thing they want is a perky youngster offering to make TikTok videos or to buy opioids for them on the dark web.

Isaac claims to know someone whose dad works in Downing Street as head of robotics, AI, digital manipulation and Deep-State fakery or something. And this leading civil servant has been told to cancel all leave from the start of April. To Isaac this heralds a spring election which will be a disaster for him personally. He was born in late June so he’ll lose the chance to cast his first vote. As he’s studying politics at A-level, and I’m very keen for him to get involved in the democratic process, I offer to sell him my vote. ‘OK, a fiver,’ he says. ‘By the way, is this legal?’ ‘No,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a serious offence but around here it’s standard practice.’

By ‘around here’ I mean Tower Hamlets, where voting rights are bought and sold like any other tradeable commodity. ‘I want 50 quid,’ I said.